At 42, I was removed from my home by my husband.

 

There was no warning that could have prepared me for it. No plan waiting on the other side. Just the sudden, disorienting reality of not knowing where I would be living the following week.

​

From the outside, my life appeared stable. I had a career, a professional reputation and a life that looked entirely functional by most external measures.

​

But external stability does not prepare you for the moment when the ground beneath your life disappears.

​

What I remember most from that time is not the practical chaos, although there was plenty of it. It is the internal silence that follows when the version of yourself you have been maintaining for years suddenly has nowhere left to perform.

​

When the structure falls away, what remains is just you.

​

And sometimes, you do not recognise what you find.

​

I was not broken. But I was lost in a way I did not yet have language for.

​

What followed was not a sudden transformation. It was something quieter and slower: the gradual process of understanding how the beliefs I carried about myself about what I deserved, what was possible and what was safe - had shaped many of the decisions I had made, including those that kept me in a situation long after I knew something was not right.

​

That work changed everything. Not quickly, but completely.

​

I rebuilt my life. I rebuilt my career. I went on to lead at director level within demanding luxury retail environments and eventually founded Inner Edge CEO, a coaching practice built upon one central understanding:

​

Our identity shapes what we believe is possible and the choices we make from there.

​

But I never forgot what it felt like to be the person on the other side of that moment.

​

The person who looks capable from the outside but is barely holding things together within.

​

The person who has already tried to help themselves and still feels stuck.

The person who cannot explain exactly what is wrong, only that something essential feels missing.

​

Moving Forward Against the Odds was created for that person.

​

Not to fix them. Not to rush them towards a version of recovery that looks good on paper.

But to create a space where the real work can happen: the quiet, often unglamorous work of reconnecting with who you are and what you are capable of even when life has made that difficult to see.

​

People are not broken.

​

Sometimes life has simply been very hard.

​

And moving forward is always possible, even when the evidence for it feels thin on the ground.

​

That is not a promise I make lightly.

​

It is one I have lived.

​

Iwona Ogodazi
Founder, Moving Forward Against the Odds CIC